Letter to price comparison websites

20th October 2014

We spent 13 weeks looking at price comparison websites. We've
got over 200 screenshots. You won't like what we found. That's why
we've written to the sites themselves and asked politicians to act
and the CMA, Energy Select Committee and EU Competition Commission
to investigate.

All the major price comparison websites hid the cheapest deal
from customers. Many for weeks on end.

uSwitch, the largest energy switching website, never showed the
cheapest deal. It regularly hid three out of the top five cheapest
deals.

Every site uses a mechanism to hide deals where they ask users
if they want to see deals they can switch to "today" or "now".

Clicking "Yes" filters out all deals which do not earn the
price comparison site a commission from the energy company. Often
these deals are the cheapest.

Money Supermarket and Confused pre-fill this question
"Yes".

Compare the Market and Go Compare automatically show users the
results without even asking this question. You have to go through
several screens to "filter your results" to see the cheapest
deals.

Overall price comparison sites hid almost a third of deals from
customers via this method.

We also believe that this research shows that these sites may be
breaking EU consumer protection law. We've written to the five
biggest sites - Compare the Market, Go Compare, uSwitch,
MoneySupermarket and Confused - asking that they stop this
activity. We've also asked Government to take action, the
Competition and Markets Authority to expand their inquiry into the
energy market to include these sites and the EU Competition
Commission to investigate their actions.

*The letter to price comparison sites has been updated. We have
removed the reference to Martin Lewis and MoneySupermarket. Martin
Lewis has no day to day control over MoneySupermarket. We apologise
for our error.